B’Man’s Revolt – by DC DaveThe more I learn, particularly when it involves history over about the past two centuries, the more I discover that things are almost the opposite of what we have been led to believe they were. Historians, for instance, consistently rank Woodrow Wilson as one of America’s best presidents, but now we have a very well reasoned argument from David Stockman that almost everything bad that happened in the 20th century resulted from Wilson’s decision to involve us needlessly in what was known at the time as the Great War. And Stockman even omits any mention of theBalfour Declaration, whose promises Great Britain could not have made good upon without U.S. entry into the war, and the endlessly troublesome state of Israel would not have been created.
The Wilson administration also gave us the federal income tax and the Federal Reserve. But Wilson got a lot of his countrymen killed toiling on the winning side of a war, and that was good enough to merit a place in the presidential pantheon for the power worshippers of academia. Just look at the company he keeps there, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and George Washington.
Speaking of the Balfour Declaration, in which the British government promised a home to world Jewry in their ancestral land of Palestine, assuming the Brits could grab it from the Ottoman Empire, who were allies of the Germans in the Great War, the latest best evidence indicates that Palestine is not the ancient home of the Jews, after all. According to Shlomo Sand, a very diligent 
Israeli history professor and author of The Invention of the Jewish People, virtually all of the so-called “Jewish diaspora” are descendants of converts to Judaism, products of the era in which it was a proselytizing religion almost as much as was Christianity. And if that were not bad enough for the conventional wisdom, Sand tells us that, in all likelihood, many if not most of today’s Arab Palestinians are the descendants of the Biblical Israelites (along with Philistines, Hittites, Samaritans, and offspring of various conquerors and local women) who were given a very strong incentive to convert by the conquering Arabs. Initially, the caliph taxed only non-believers in Islam.
Lied to about McCarthy
See what we mean by everything being the opposite of what we’ve been told? And that brings us back to Joe McCarthy. Has any American elected official ever been so completely vilified as has the junior Senator from Wisconsin? He is best known today for the term of opprobrium that A.Word.A.Day defines as, “The practice of making unfounded accusations against someone,” and backs up with this etymology: “After US senator Joseph McCarthy (1909-1957) known for making unsubstantiated claims accusing people of being Communists, spies, and disloyal.”
With his finger held carefully to the political winds an execrable young academic careerist by the name of Matthew A. McNiece could refer in his 2008 dissertation, without fear of contradiction, to “the burgeoning anticommunist hysteria that bred all manner of conspiracy theories–culminating most recognizably in McCarthy‘s unverified claim of widespread communist infiltration of the federal government.”
The fact of the matter is that McCarthy’s claims were “unsubstantiated” or “unverified” only to the extent that the Truman—and later the Eisenhower—administration, with the aid of allies in the Senate and the news media, put up all manner of obstacles to McCarthy’s attempt to show publicly what he had learned privately, mainly from the FBI. An example of how the obstacles were placed and the history of the period distorted is shown in my 2011 article, “M. Stanton Evans on Good Night and Good Luck.”
What McCarthy was up against, and some appreciation of the degree of Communist and pro-Communist infiltration and, indeed, takeover of key levers of power by the end of the 1940s can be had by examining the 1952 report of the Senate Judiciary Committee, of which, McCarthy was never a member. These conclusions are completely supported by the testimony of the independent-minded private citizen, Alfred Kohlberg, who lays heavy blame upon the Institute for Pacific Relations (IPR) for the fall of China to the Communists in 1949. One of the key members of the IPR mentioned in the report was Owen Lattimore, who was also one of McCarthy’s main targets. The primary avenue of Lattimore’s influence upon government policy on China was through his close associate, Lauchlin Currie, who had been revealed to the White House as a Soviet agent by Communist defector Whittaker Chambers in 1939 at a time that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were allies.
INSTITUTE OF PACIFIC RELATIONS REPORT
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY*
SECOND SESSION
JULY 2 (legislative day JUNE 27), 1952.—Ordered to be printed.
CONCLUSIONS
The Institute of Pacific Relations has not maintained the character of an objective scholarly and research organization.
* * *
The IPR has been considered by the American Communist Party and by Soviet officials as an instrument of Communist policy, propaganda and military intelligence.
* * *
The IP disseminated and sought to popularize false information including information originating from Soviet and Communist sources.
* * *
A small core of officials and staff members carried the main burden of IPR activities and directed its administration and policies.
* * *
Members of the small core of officials and staff members who controlled IPR were either Communist or pro-Communist.
* * *
There is no evidence that the large majority of its members supported the IPR for any reason except to advance the professed research and scholarly purposes of the organization.
* * *
Most members of the IPR, and most members of the Board of Trustees, were inactive and obviously without any influence over the policies of the organization and the conduct of its affairs.
* * *
IPR activities were made possible largely through the financial support of American industrialists, corporations, and foundations, the majority of whom were not familiar with the inner workings of the organization. (Emphasis added)
* * *
The effective leadership of the IPR often sought to deceive IPR contributors and supporters as to the true character and activities of the organization.
—
Owen Lattimore was, from some time beginning in the 1930’s, a conscious articulate instrument of the Soviet conspiracy.
—
Owen Lattimore testified falsely before the subcommittee with reference to at least five separate matters that were relevant to the inquiry and substantial in import.
—
Owen Lattimore and John Carter Vincent were influential in bringing about a change in United States policy in 1945 favorable to the Chinese Communists.
—
Many of the persons active in and around the IPR, and in particular though not exclusively Owen Lattimore, Edward C. Carter, Frederick V. Field, T.A. Bisson, Lawrence K. Rosinger, and Maxwell Stewart, knowingly and deliberately used the language of books and articles which they wrote or edited in an attempt to influence the American public by means of pro-Communist or pro-Soviet content of such writings.
* * *
The net effect of IPR activities on United States public opinion has been such as to serve international Communist interests and to affect [sic] adversely the interest of the United States.
Look again at the passage I have emphasized: “IPR activities were made possible largely through the financial support of American industrialists, corporations, and foundations, the majority of whom were not familiar with the inner workings of the organization.” The committee coyly leaves the reader with the impression that those providing the funding for the IPR were duped by the Communist staff members, just as IPR member Kohlberg had been duped before he began to take a more careful look at the organization.
Tune Callers Identified
But we all know that the old saying is usually valid that “he who pays the piper calls the tune.” Forget about the majority of contributors providing financing; what about the key minority of contributors who provided the majority of the financing? The committee is strategically silent on that absolutely crucial question. For that, we must turn to the pages of Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time by the very well connected Georgetown University historian, Carroll Quigley:
In 1951 the Subcommittee on Internal Security of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the so-called McCarran Committee, sought to show that China had been lost to the Communists by the deliberate actions of a group of academic experts on the Far East and Communist fellow travelers whose work in that direction was controlled and coordinated by the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR). The influence of the Communists in IPR is well established, but the patronage of Wall Street is less well known.
The IPR was a private association of ten independent national councils in ten countries concerned with affairs in the Pacific. The headquarters of the IPR and of the American Council of IPR were both in New York and were closely associated on an interlocking basis. Each spent about $2.5 million dollars over the quarter-century from 1925 to 1950, of which about half, in each case, came from the Carnegie Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation (which were themselves interlocking groups controlled by an alliance of Morgan and Rockefeller interests in Wall Street). Much of the rest, especially of the American Council, came from firms closely allied to these two Wall Street interests, such as Standard Oil, International Telephone and Telegraph, International General Electric, the National City Bank, and the Chase National Bank. In each case, about 10 percent of income came from sales of publications and, of course, a certain amount came from ordinary members who paid $15 a year and received the periodicals of the IPR and its American Council, Pacific Affairs and Far Eastern Survey.
The financial deficits which occurred each year were picked up by financial angels, almost all with close Wall Street connections. The chief identifiable contributions here were about $60,000 from Frederick Vanderbilt Field over eighteen years, $14,700 from Thomas Lamont over fourteen years, $800 from Corliss Lamont (only after 1947), and $18,000 from a member of Lee, Higginson in Boston who seems to have been Jerome D. Greene. In addition, large sums of money each year were directed to private individuals for research and travel expenses from similar sources, chiefly the great financial foundations.
Most of these awards for work in the Far Eastern area required approval or recommendation from members of IPR. Moreover, access to publication and recommendations to academic positions in the handful of great American universities concerned with the Far East required similar sponsorship. And, finally, there can be little doubt that consultant jobs on Far Eastern matters in the State Department or other government agencies were largely restricted to IPR-approved people. The individuals who published, who had money, found jobs, were consulted, and who were appointed intermittently to government missions were those who were tolerant of the IPR line. The fact that all these lines of communication passed through the Ivy League universities or their scattered equivalents west of the Appalachians, such as Chicago, Stanford, or California, unquestionably went back to Morgan’s influence in handling large academic endowments.
—
It was this group of people, whose wealth and influence so exceeded their experience and understanding, who provided much of the frame-work of influence which the Communist sympathizers and fellow travelers took over in the United States in the 1930′s. It must be recognized that the power that these energetic Left-wingers exercised was never their own power or Communist power but was ultimately the power of the international financial coterie, and, once the anger and suspicions of the American people were aroused, as they were by 1950, it was a fairly simple matter to get rid of the Red sympathizers. Before this could be done, however, a congressional committee, following backward to their source the threads which led from admitted Communists like Whittaker Chambers, through Alger Hiss, and the Carnegie Endowment to Thomas Lamont and the Morgan Bank, fell into the whole complicated network of the interlocking tax-exempt foundations. The Eighty-third Congress in July 1953 set up a Special Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations with Representative B. Carroll Reece, of Tennessee, as chairman. It soon became clear that people of immense wealth would be unhappy if the investigation went too far and that the “most respected” newspapers in the country, closely allied with these men of wealth, would not get excited enough about any relevations to make the publicity worth while, in terms of votes or campaign contributions. An interesting report showing the Left-wing associations of the interlocking nexus of tax-exempt foundations was issued in 1954 rather quietly. Four years later, the Reece committee’s general counsel, Rene A. Wormser, wrote a shocked, but not shocking, book on the subject called Foundations: Their Power and Influence. (Emphasis added)
So, the missing names from the Senate Committee reports were primarily the big Wall Street connected foundations of the Rockefellers and J.P. Morgan. The Senate Judiciary Committee knew how far they could go in belling the cat, but McCarthy didn’t know how far he could go. Quigley, himself, as a member of the established American academic history community, was also a lot like the Committee in his circumspection. My quotes are from pp. 945-956 of his book, which can be found on the Internet here. One can see there that in the midst of his shocking revelations Quigley creates a red herring and lets loose a blast at those who have drawn what would appear to be quite plausible conclusions:
The radical Right version of these events as written up by John T. Flynn, Freda Utley, and others, was even more remote from the truth than were [Communist defectors Louis] Budenz’s or [Elizabeth] Bentley’s versions, although it had a tremendous impact on American opinion and American relations with other countries in the years 1947-1955. This radical Right fairy tale, which is now an accepted folk myth in many groups in America, pictured the recent history of the United States, in regard to domestic reform and in foreign affairs, as a well-organized plot by extreme Left-wing elements, operating from the White House itself and controlling all the chief avenues of publicity in the United States, to destroy the American way of life, based on private enterprise, laissez faire, and isolationism, in behalf of alien ideologies of Russian Socialism and British cosmopolitanism (or internationalism).
In the great mass of Quigley’s verbiage, though, is the simple truth that the heavy hitters of Wall Street knowingly funded a massive sell-out to the Communists in the Far East. One might speculate as to what their purposes were in doing so, but it would appear that the fact they did so is indisputable. Noticeably absent from the pages of his work is the name of Alfred Kohlberg, a businessman with no particular ideological axe to grind, whose description of the IPRas a thoroughly Communist and very influential outfit accords quite closely to what Quigley suggests is a “radical Right fairy tale.”
A View from Down Under
Fortunately, we don’t have to depend upon Quigley’s muddy and sometimes contradictory prose to see who destroyed Joe McCarthy and why they did it:
The deathblow to McCarthy’s campaign was instigated not by some Party hack at the Daily Worker, but by Sen. Ralph
Flanders, who introduced the resolution for Senate censure of McCarthy. This was backed by Sen. Herbert Lehman, son of Mayer Lehman, founder of Lehman Brothers international investment bank, of which Herbert was a partner.
—
Lehman, like the Warburgs, Schiffs, et al., was one of those who intermarried among the banking dynasties, marrying Edith Louise Altschul, the daughter of the head of the New York branch of Lazard Frères, the Paris-based banking house. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his campaign against Sen. McCarthy, as was the anti-McCarthy cartoonist Herbert Block.
Sen. Flanders as the introducer of the Senate death blow to McCarthy himself had an interesting background, not as some “progressive” or liberal Democrat, but as a Republican, an industrialist and a banker.
—
McCarthy’s most dangerous enemies were, in this writer’s opinion, not the Soviet spies and American Communist Party functionaries he was exposing, but those whom he had not even yet got around to targeting, the power elite and their agents.
Flanders had been president of the Boston Federal Reserve Bank for two years prior to being elected Senator for Vermont. In
1942 he was appointed to the Committee for Economic Development, which was established to formulate US post-war economic policy, including the role of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
—
Keep in mind at this stage that both Flanders and Lehman were members of the Council on Foreign Relations, which CFR official historian Peter Grosse described as “the US foreign policy
Other CFR study group members included Lauchlin Currie and Benjamin V Cohen both from the US State Department, Asia expert Prof. Owen Lattimore, and economist Leo Pasvolsky, special assistant for post-war planning to the US Secretary of State. All of these CFR advisers were to come to the attention of Sen. McCarthy’s investigations into subversion.
This CFR connection is a primary key to understanding McCarthy’s political destruction….
All of these quotes (with links supplied by me) are from the well-documented November 2013 article, “Joe McCarthy & the Establishment Bolsheviks,” by New Zealand writer Kerry Bolton, and I commend it to readers in its entirety. Here is Bolton’s conclusion:
McCarthy was finished off by a coalition of Big Business, CFR, Business Advisory Council, US Administration, New York Times, Washington Post, CIA. He carried on as Senator for a further several years during which time he was ostracised and his speeches boycotted in the Senate. McCarthy was wrecked emotionally and physically by the campaign against him, Fred J Cook describing him as “a pale ghost of his former self”; he died in 1957 at the age of 48. E Merrill Root cogently described the situation with which McCarthy was probably unknowingly confronted: “. . . I do not think that the Senator ever quite saw the real nature of the enemy within, the full scope of the Conspiracy in New York and Washington . . ..”
A different perspective on Joe McCarthy: Mrs Jean McCarthy thanks the Marine Corps for the honours that were accorded to her late husband, showing a man of tolerance, bravery and humour. Note Mrs McCarthy’s references to the DCF and the Air Medal Four Stars, and the citation for bravery written by Admiral Nimitz. The letter is featured on the website of The 8th & I Reunion Association of the US Marine Corps. McCarthy, a Judge at the time of World War II, had volunteered for Service, despite his exemption. One of the major smears against McCarthy continues to be that he had not seen active service, that the image of “Tail Gunner Joe” was a myth, and that he had faked the Nimitz citation for bravery
Joe McCarthy might be a prophet without honor in his own land, but it’s good to see that that is not the case in at least one small corner of New Zealand.
To my mind, the biggest indicator of Senator McCarthy’s naiveté is that he allowed himself to be treated at Bethesda Naval Hospital, considering the fate that had befallen James Forrestal there. For evidence that McCarthy’s death may not have been any more natural than was Forrestal’s, see The Assassination of Joe McCarthyby Medford Evans and the section entitled “McCarthy’s Death at Bethesda” in my article “James Forrestal and Joe McCarthy.”
*This report is Appendix L of the very illuminating book, The China Lobby Man: The Story of Alfred Kohlberg by Joseph Keeley. The appendices alone are worth the price of the book. Kohlberg’s Senate testimony was also a Keeley appendix as was the JFK speech around which I built the article, “John F. Kennedy on the Loss of China.” There’s something very curious about this book, though. If you go to the Amazon.com page for the unbound version, what you will see there represented as an illustration of the cover is actually a picture of the cover of one of the most worthless books ever written, Quotations from Chairman Bill: the Best of William F. Buckley, Jr. I know that it is worthless because when I ordered the Keeley book from a used book company, what they sent me was the Buckley abomination instead. Naturally, I complained and requested that I get what I had ordered. The sellers told me not to bother even sending the Buckley book back and they then sent me the requested Keeley work.
What’s going on? To find out, go to BookFinder.com and search for the book using author and title. When the Keeley book comes up its ISBN will accompany it. Now go back and do the search again, but this time only by that ISBN. All you get is that lousy Buckley book. The two books have the same ISBN. The Keeley book came first, but the Buckley book has been given its ISBN and now seems to have been given priority. A more suspicious mind than mine might conclude that someone is steering us away from the story of the China Lobby Man and those valuable appendices.
July 17, 2014